Science Fiction Though the Decades

Monday, September 23, 2013

1991: The Silent Stars Go By (White, James)

Lengthy evidence of White’s
passion and skill (4/5)

Though it may surprise many SF enthusiasts, James
White had no actual training in the medical field; rather, James White lived vicariously
as a doctor and a healer through his stories. His ambition to become a doctor
was stilted by financial limitations, but this didn’t smother his sense of
imagination. A series of Sector General novels marked the end of this writing
in the 1990s, all around the 300 page mark, a word-count of which most of
novels hover around. There is only one exception to the length of his novels—The
Silent Stars Go By, a densely packed 441-page novel which probably trumps
the word-count of any other of his novels by a factor of two. It seems that
James White really put his heart into this one at the ripe age of 63—and it
shows.

Having read fourteen other pieces of his work, this
is by far the most mature, the most detailed, and likely the most loved by
James White himself. And thanks to the legendary Vincent Di Fate for the
terrible cover of the only publication of this novel—it’s a terrible clichéd sketch,
nothing from the book has been manifested onto the cover.

Rear cover synopsis:

“The Kingdom of Hibernia had risen from its sleepy
emerald isle to befriend the native Redman of the West, and, with the
technology brought out of the ancient Egyptian lands, had forged a mighty
industrial empire. And after generations of development under the Pax Hibernia,
the Empire was poised for humankind’s greatest adventure—settling a new world
under a distant star.

Healer Nolan was a lone male in the traditionally
female healing profession and an unbeliever in the religion of the priest-kings
of Hibernia. He had to be careful to avoid any trouble that could jeopardize
his place among the crew of the starship Aisling Gheal. But the lowly
Healer was unaware of his part in a struggle for control of the future colony…
until he discovered evidence of a plot against the project: a secret plan for
the new world that did not include heretics like Nolan.

And as betrayal and deceit followed Nolan into the
silent depths of space and on to the surface of a raw, untamed planet, he was
challenged to become the one thing he had never dreamed of—a hero.”

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Healer Nolan is a doctor, psychologist, botanist, and
therapist—the title of “Healer” is as much of a burden as it is a necessity,
where the doctor must treat the mind of the body, they must also be abstinent. The
career of Healer is traditionally and historically female because, “in body and
mind they are born to the work … sensitivity, sympathy, and empathy” (231). Healer
Nolan is a surgeon by trade and, in the words of his soon-to-be superior
Dervla, “seem[s] to always consider the feelings and needs of others to the
exclusion” of his own, yet he is a “great, fat jelly of a man with no backbone,
no mind of his own, and a man who can refuse nothing to anybody” (209). These
biting words don’t deter him from accepting a crewmember position in one of
humanity’s greatest endeavors.

The Kingdom of Hibernia
(modern-day Ireland) is funding a vast project to send Earth’s first starship,
the Aisling Gheal (Bright Vision), to the distant world of the New World.
However, due to the physical immensity, staggering logistics, and exuberant
cost of the project, nations from around the world are pitching in to help yet
also demand their cultural representation among the cryogenically stored
colonists: Nippon (Japan), Aztec (Central America), Skandia (Scandinavia), West
Land (North America), Cathay (China), Teuton (Germany), and India. The crew,
however, are mainly clerics, priests, and cardinals of the Hibernian religion;
this management by the church has its expected results of heretical suppression
and plans to proselytize to non-believers.

Ireland’s rise to global power
and industrial expertise came after

sketches of the aeolipile of Hero of Alexandria
found their way to Ireland, to the court of the High-King, and brought about a
many-centuries-premature industrial revolution that made the country militarily
unassailable and the most technologically advanced of its time.(440)

This very early advancement in
steam power and, thus, more modern technology allowed Ireland to bypass the
Dark Ages’ religious persecution of knowledge and forge ahead to
conceptualizing colonizing the stars. The year A.D. 1491 looked to be the
greatest year of mankind.

Generations in the making, the Aisling
Gheal is set for a 500-year journey to the New World yet regardless of
language, each country and its people called the New World with some similar
resonance of hope and prosperity—“the New World, the New Home, or the New
Future” (74). This world amid the stars has “no axial tilt and, therefore, no
seasonal changes for the farmers to worry about. The world rotates
approximately once every twenty-nine and one-half hours, its year is two
hundred and ninety-six planetary days” (75) with an atmospheric composition and
pressure close to Earth’s own. They longer they obverse their intended home,
“the more perfect it becomes” (75). The singular continent of Dragonia is their
colonial target—“close to twelve thousand miles long and more than two thousand
at its widest point. It lay diagonally across two hemispheres with its [the
dragon’s] head and tail touching the north and south polar icefields” (256).
Lushly green and inviting, covered in water with tolerable weather, animal life
flourishing yet without major predators—New World is as good as it gets…

…yet, an arduous journey awaits
the crew of the Aisling Gheal. Unbeknownst the ecclesiastical crew, the
cardinal-captain devices even more rigid terms of wakefulness during their
period of watch, an occasional two-year term aside from being frozen. Only one
crew member will be on watch at any one time for a span of “two long and lonely
years” (152) when the individual would sleep in stasis for centuries and resume
their watch… accumulating to a subjective four years of solitude manning a
vessel in which very little could go wrong. They are forbidden to speak, walk
on the hull, play games or read books; they are expected to depend on their own
“mental resources for recreation, amusement and … constructive thought” (153).
The cardinal-captain’s recurring words of persuasion are “We are no longer of
Earth” (157), a salvo of reason which, at the very sound, the crew cower in
future fear.

The first crewmember on watch is
Healer Nolan. Being the only heretic among the crew, this appointment is seen
as a punishment for his unreserved questioning of the feasibility and ethics of
the new watch terms. Once on the planet and in the colony, his “job will be to
bring healing, enlightenment, and knowledge to the colonists and their offspring”
(26), but for his remaining time being “warm” prior to his cryogenic sleep,
Healer Nolan must solve a riddle. The doctor-patient privilege is extended to
verbal agreements, of which Nolan has several; he must watch the sleeper
caskets of two females who have been matched to other colonists. Though these
arranged marriage is forbidden, the influence of the powerful have entrusted
Nolan with the care of their brides-to-be. However, many caskets were moved
during his period of confinement, a questionable act of motive and ethics by
the captain-cardinal which Nolan feels indebted to solve; however, entrance is
to the sleeper sections is forbidden as they kept dangerously cold.
Undoubtedly, the crafty Nolan knows the way.

Nolan’s intuition proves fruitful
in his capacity as a reluctant leader. Once on the surface of New Home, the
malevolent intentions of the clerics becomes clear when he and a number of
other atheists find themselves thousands of miles from the colony. With huge
tracts of unexplored territory ahead of them, Nolan makes the difficult choice
of forging ahead, under the canopy of bizarre flora of New World, through the
spans of time where boredom and strife persist, and among the bitter opinions
of his fellow outcasts. Nolan’s knowledge of sampling flora for medicine and
food greatly extends their appreciation for his efforts, but opinions are
divided between pressing forward toward a colony resentful of their sacrilege
or settling their own colony on a planet which seems uncaring for the humans
scurrying through her underbrush. By land or by sea, Nolan knows the way.

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This is James White’s epic novel,
a combination of passions: Ireland and the medical profession; it’s also an
alternative history novel, a planet colonization novel, and backwoods adventure
novel. White had plenty of ideas to play with when writing this book, the
details and length are obvious indicators of the amount of effort and passion
he put into this book—like no other book he’s ever written. Where some of the Sector General series books
feel generic, forced or turned out, The Silent Stars Go By is an
intricate work of love: embroidered rather than stitched, inscribed rather than
chiseled, gilt rather than simply adorned.

Yet, the novel isn’t without one
touch which touches base on White’s own Sector General series. Nolan makes a
which in which he orates,

They [many
wise men and women] believe that there is a very strong probability … that
the microscopic form of life which inhabit all living creatures, and dwell in
the soil, sea, and air of the New World, will have no effect on us whatsoever.
They believe that the germs which may have caused pestilence among the
creatures of the New World since the dawn of its history would find our bodies,
and those of our breeding animals, so strange and unworldly that they would
simply ignore us. Similarly, any germs which we chanced to bring with is, in
spite of the many precautions we are taking to ensure that the colonists and
crew are disease-free, would have no effect on the creatures that live there.
(79-80)

The Silent Stars Go By is largely a linear novel about Nolan’s experience
prior to his ascent to Aisling Gheal, his limited time on the Aisling
Gheal, and his time on the planet of New Home. However, being an
alternative history novel, White dedicates a few chapters to the most important
historical periods which forged the future for Ireland, the Healers, and for
relations during colonization; notably, chapters 10-12 and chapters 43-44.
These intermittent pauses in the narrative are enlightening into the world
which White has created, but the transitions are abrupt and disruptive. There’s
an additional gap in the narrative between chapters 25 and 26; this transition
is so abrupt that the reader needs time to pause, reflect, and predict the
intended course of action; this is a very skilled transition between the
expected and unexpected.

White’s characterization of Nolan
is quite decent. He’s a man who must maintain solid morals but his intelligence
and quick wit tend to outpace his sense of reservation. Some of his remarks are
acerbic but poignant, where the truth is a bitter pill to swallow; trained as a
doctor, truth is his prescription. His remarks scathe his superiors in the
church and even prominent people in other countries and universities. This flaw
of Nolan’s is exacerbated by the slowly sinking reality of captain-cardinal’s
words, “We are no longer of Earth”. To this, Nolan molds his own vision of a
colony outside the influence of centuries past, the onus of ecclesiastical
dogma, and the dragging deadweight of the ruling elite. If there was ever a
point in Earth’s history where tradition could be shrugged off for personal
and/or mankind’s benefit, now would be the time.

I’m not too enlightened by White’s
alternative history where Ireland and its religion have basically ruled the
world on an industrial scale. The early start to the Industrial Revolution is
interesting and the resulting rise of technology in an era devoid of the Dark
Ages, thus mankind’s ability to rocket to the stars and able to colonize a
planet in the year 1491. How the church played a pivotal role in Ireland rise
to power, I don’t know, but it’s quite obvious that in White’s vision, the
church’s influence spans beyond the common parish and district into the
heavy-handed formal power of domestic affairs and even the further flung
international affairs. Interesting, but a bit lost on me.

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This, again, is the finest White
novel in his bibliography… it’s also the longest and most essentially comprised
of White’s pet projects. This doesn’t make it necessarily readable at times,
but the skill and passion for the project is obvious. There’s not much left in
White’s bibliography that I haven’t read yet, but the only other two books on
my shelves are of his Sector General series, a foray back to his mediocrity
which I’m unwilling and unprepared to undertake after reading his finest piece—The
Silent Stars Go By.